During November 2006, the WLUML exhibition focusing on various types of dress worn by women in selected Muslim contexts, "Dress Codes and Modes", was on display at the Department of Gender Studies at Mount Holyoke College.

For the past month a renewed debate about citizenship, religious freedom and gender hasbeen raging in Britain. Marieme Helie Lucas offers her perspective and throws down a few challenges to the "coward Left".

In 1950 Sarajevo's local parliament introduced a law to ban veils "with the aim of removing the centuries old tradition of oppressing the female population," but today many daughters and granddaughters of these women have put the hijab back on again.

A presentation by Aisha Lee Shaheed, an independent writer-researcher and WLUML networker upon the Canadian launch of the "Dress Codes and Modes: Women's dress in some Muslim countries and communities" exhibition in August 2006.

From a hard knot of contradictions a further thread has unravelled, and the most preposterous rationalization of all, particularly coming out of the mouths of men - that the niqab is a feminist declaration.

The hijab survived the controversy it once generated because it is a milder form of modesty. Allow me to mention that our mothers and sisters didn't feel the need to wrap their heads or cover their faces and still maintained their modesty in public.

Whoever today does not add an S to 'veil' and, even worse, refers to ‘The Islamic Veil' (singular), wittingly or unwittingly, promotes the fundamentalist agenda. In these troubled times of history, I have become finicky about concepts and epistemology, writes sociologist and founder of WLUML, Marieme Hélie-Lucas

For 15 years, Somalia was ruled by clan-based strongmen, each with his own private army. Over that period of chaos, violence and war, the women of Mogadishu have risked their lives time and again -- and in the process changed their country.